Lauren Indvik summarized the contextual significance of Wood's award in a piece she wrote for the media and business website Mashable: "The award may be Wood’s, but Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington is a clear beneficiary. Over the past few years, Huffington has made a point of hiring experienced, well-known and (no doubt) expensive reporters like Wood. The hirings are part of an effort to position the Huffington Post as a serious news organization — not, as former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has described it, as an 'overaggregator' of 'celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications.'"

Forbes.com's Jeff Bercovici wrote Monday that Wood is "a longtime military correspondent for Time, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and other news organizations, (and) has been a Pulitzer finalist before but has never won. He’s one of the relatively small number of journalists who worked at AOL before the (Huffington Post) merger, at Politics Daily, and was retained afterward."